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Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#551

Post by sAbakumoff »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #284

I have semi-automated cooking for the week ahead. We recently started cooking meals for the week ahead on Sundays and then freezing them. The aim was to give us more time with the kids and to cut down on housework. To save time on the Sunday cooking session I have cobbled together a very clunky, and I mean VERY clunky semi-automated cooking system. It comprises a Raspberry PI which controls a couple of WiFi mains swi…

I'm just wondering, how do you spend this time you saved by using this terribly sounding device?

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#552

Post by fredoliveira »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #549
mosselman wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find investing into a Thermomix a good idea: https://thermomix.com/

I imagine the reason you're being downvoted is because you've posted this link multiple times without explaining your connection (if any) with this company. At the moment you look like a spammer.

Unrelated to GP, or to the company that makes those machines. But I do have one and it's pretty decent (but also loud on high speed settings). Saves us a bit of trouble here at home by automating some common things in cooking. Most of the time we use it for soups and batters.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#553

Post by Fedoranimus »

FuckOffNeemo wrote: post #136
atmosx wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sickbeard and couchPotato did that through GUI with a few clicks a few years ago (at least).

Sonarr, Lidarr and Radarr do it much better these days :)

I concur, big fan of Radarr especially. ;-)

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#554

Post by noxToken »

ghaff wrote: post #332
sushid wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds amazingly complex and cool at the same time. Have you looked into sous vide machines or pressure cookers? Those two are the items I use the most to get precisely cooked meals done in batches. I've found that a lot of meals done via the slow cooker tend to taste the same because of the consistently and the type of ingredients typically involved in them.

The problem with slow cookers is that the chop a bunch of stuff up, toss them in the slow cooker, and turn it on approach doesn't work all that well. You generally want to brown things etc.--and then you're not gaining that much. But, then, I'm mostly not a huge fan of stews in general.

I think there are three problems with most slow cooker recipes.

1.) My hi/low setting probably doesn't match your hi/low setting. From the get go, we're cooking the same meal at two different temperatures.

2.) A lot of recipes seem to call for low setting for 8 hours. This works well for a lot of people with a standard American work day, since a stew/soup will stay above safe warming temperature in a nearly sealed pot. However, the cook times are too long. Thawed chicken for 8 hours on low almost never turns out with the right texture. In this case, it's convenience > taste.

3.) The flavor is cooked out of the ingredients, and/or there isn't enough seasoning or too many ingredients. When you get the seasoning right, too long of a cook time can dull the flavor. When there isn't enough seasoning, then your meal is bland from the start. When there are too many herbs and spices, you get a mish-mash of flavors that are all competing for attention. There was an article on here a long while ago that categorized foods into low and high amplitude flavors. Something sharply distinctive was high amplitude (think nacho cheese Doritos), while a low amplitude food had weak, hard to discern flavors (plain grits). Too many different ingredients can lead to low amplitude foods, and when I see an ingredient list with 15 different herbs and spices, I almost always steer clear.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#555

Post by vajenetehais »

lorki wrote: post #454
danieka wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really fascinating :) I'd love to use the same system. Is it open source?

+1 Would also like to know the inner workings, a general hint to the approach taken would already be awesome

i got a sql database :

Recipes table : it tooks some months to fill it with our choices (prefered recipes) and add attributes to that : cold/warm meal, difficulty, time taken, kind of meal (junk, bistrot, classical, exotic...), does it scale (x0.5, x2, x4...).

ingredient_table : each receipe got ingredients. Every kind of ingredrients are on a separate table.

product_table : it is there i display what you can buy from stores : 6/12/24 eggs bundle, 250/500g butter

Then it starts to be ugly, cause there is constraints : loose and hard. Timetable is a hard constraint (i don't want to cook monday evening), so it will be double ration one of the day before, Season is a hard constraint (you buy vegetables when they are in season) Tastes are a hard constraint : you decides what kind of meal you want to eat during the weak

With that you get available recipes and a timetable for cooking and quantity to cook.

Price is a lose constraint, leftovers are a lose constraint, time spent cooking is a lose constraint (could be a hard, if you have enough recipes, but as i like cooking, it's no matter for me)

After, i enumerate all possibilities and each one get a score based on lose constraints : you can use a simple weighted average, exponentially weighted average... You tweak coefs to prefer a nice price or a little time spent and then it's done. Usually a chose randomly between the ten best solutions.

I got enough recipes to cover all hard constraints. I avoid lot of problems doing a big enumeration for all possibilities (it takes a couple of minutes at my scale for 200 recipes), also, hard constraints are pretty easy to deal with, it could be a lot more complicated if user become picky on meals. I'm no coder so i don't know any design pattern or anything that could help me to design a better algo. But, as far as i know, when you can't evaluate all possibilities you have to go the optimization road.

Answers to questions : - Yeah, there is this website : https://fr-en.openfoodfacts.org/ (broken TLS it seems) that could be used to pull data on ingredients, - I don't have plan to open-source it : it's pretty hacky, ugly and probably defy any coding rule (except 4 space ident PEP8). it's not even packeged (i've never done that before...)

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#556

Post by wink »

tga wrote: post #190
t0mek wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I see two options here. First is to analyze the other signal features of the commercials (eg. increased volume), although it may be tricky. The other option is a crowd-sourced solution - pretty much as for the browser adblock - where users can mark samples recognized as ads. Since the publishers often buy campaigns for many stations in the same country or state, it may be a shared database. On the other hand,…

How about a third option, ads are by definition short and repeat a lot. No fancy ML needed, after a couple of times the filter gets one of these repeating fragments it should be able to block it. Fairness bonus: you get to hear each new ad a couple of times.

It sounds easy, but often isn't.

Maybe radio spots are a little different because they're cheaper and usually more low-quality than TV ads, but it doesn't really work for TV ads - they often have small variations, e.g. 10sec identical, 5sec different, 10sec identical (easy example). Also depending on your method of analyzing the audio it's sometimes broadcast with an unhearable fingerprint that distorts the waveform (let's say like MP3 versus WAV, but worse).

So yes, you can find some patterns - but the commercial breaks are highly mixed up and you wouldn't believe how many distinct commercials per channel are there, even if you think you hear the same ones all the time :)

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#557

Post by mosselman »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #549
mosselman wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find investing into a Thermomix a good idea: https://thermomix.com/

I imagine the reason you're being downvoted is because you've posted this link multiple times without explaining your connection (if any) with this company. At the moment you look like a spammer.

Fair point. I dont have a connection. I just found it relevant in both branches of the discussion. In fact, I’d never buy one. But I would buy one before I started automating stirring food in pots.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#558

Post by vr46 »

fipple wrote: post #457
mosselman wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a clunky device that imitates human actions is hardly 'genius'. Resourceful maybe. An electrical coffee grinder isn't a normal coffee grinder with some rotating lever attached to it. An electrical coffee grinder has small motors attached to the grinder mechanism in order to make it move. This contraption is fun to build I am sure, but not 'genius'. Much closer to genius is the thermomix: https://thermomix.co…

I've been served Thermomix food and it was extremely unimpressive. I don't know how easy it was to make though, since I didn't participate in the cooking. I can just say that if it's any harder than microwaving it's probably not worth it.

Our Thermomix is in use everyday, and we love it, but it's not a device for the clueless or careless. Thermomix food is like any other food, the quality is entirely down to the recipe and person cooking it.

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#559

Post by 0xfeba »

TomVDB wrote: post #405
enneff wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just stand around looking at plants. Hard to overstate how good this is for one's mental health.

When we bought a house with a pool, I did not keep the existing pool maintenance guy who'd come in every week for $100/month, and neither did I install a better pool vacuum robot. I love the 30min when I come home after work where I scoop leaves and various kinds of debris out of the water. Very relaxing.

Hm, I had a pool once. Never again -- I felt like that's all I did was clean it, vacuum it, add chlorine tabs and clean the DE filter and destroy my lungs.

I also don't really like plants, or the outdoors. I'd much rather be inside in the A/C. Working on my own coding projects doesn't bother me, even after coding all day long.

Perhaps it's because I've been spending less time coding at work and more time managing...

Re: Ask HN: What are the things that you have automated in your personal life?

#560

Post by 0xfeba »

mig4ng wrote: post #287
nojvek wrote: post #205

When the dog used to wake me up in the middle of the night to drink water and take him out, I had to do to it manually. Now it’s all automated, my body just does it. 90% of brain is asleep. I look forward to automating diaper changes when the baby arrives. The subconscious brain is an incredible piece of technology.

How did you manage to do that? Is there a book or an article that you recommend reading?

It's called "Sleep Deprivation".
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